TrusTrace Strengthens Traceability Solution for Certified Material Compliance for Fashion & Apparel

STOCKHOLM, March 14, 2022 — TrusTrace, a global SaaS company with a market-leading platform for product traceability and supply chain transparency within fashion and retail, today announced the launch of TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance, a one-stop solution that enables near real-time traceability at the material level.

The solution covers the broad spectrum of requirements for material compliance including documenting the % of certified vs. non-certified material content, supporting different chain of custody models, and covering single component products to multi component products – thus serving as a single source of truth that bolsters brand confidence in their compliance journey, and supports their own commitments to move to more sustainable portfolios.

TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance gives brands granular visibility into product sustainability metrics, ensuring compliance with standards and regulations, and enabling streamlined decision-making and tighter integration with suppliers worldwide. The solution directly addresses emerging industry methodologies and pending government regulations that will require brands to base sustainability claims on verifiable and precise data.

“In the midst of global greenwashing and challenges with unsubstantiated claims, brands and regulators are moving quickly to instill confidence among consumers that products are, indeed, as sustainable as they claim to be. Brands that want to establish near real-time traceability at the lot level by mapping the movement of raw materials to finished goods – and automatically calculate the sustainability metrics of those goods – now have a proven solution in TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance,” said Shameek Ghosh, CEO of TrusTrace. “By linking all purchase orders to production steps, certificates, supplier declarations and quality reports on the TrusTrace platform, TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance helps brands manage risk and compliance and allows them to prove sustainability claims with confidence.”

Near real-time traceability allows brands to capture data from supply chain transactions as products and materials move through the value chain, meaning that finished goods have traceability information already associated with them when they arrive at market, allowing brands to easily tell the story of their products’ origins and material integrity to consumers, retailers, and regulators.

The solution can also help identify material waste in the supply chain by intelligently calculating discrepancies between inputs and outputs, thereby supporting greater efficiencies in production while keeping waste out of landfills or otherwise harming sustainability efforts.

Near Real-time and Material Traceability is Becoming Pivotal for the Fashion Industry to Comply with Current and Upcoming Regulations

For the European market, the EU is considering regulatory initiatives such as requiring claims to be backed by common measurement methodologies, and France and Denmark have already crafted legislation on documentation requirements for ESG claims.

Amsterdam-based Fashion for Good, a platform for sustainable fashion innovation, focused on bringing the fashion ecosystem together through its innovation platform and acting as a convenor for change, is among many advocates of creating more standardization in the industry.

“Real-time, fiber-forward traceability facilitates industry-wide standardization of supply chain data, laying the foundation for accurate impact tracking, trustworthy certification and wastestream analytics for fibers, materials and products,” said Katrin Ley, Managing Director at Fashion for Good. “All of these factors play a major role in authenticating sustainability claims, enabling the accurate measuring, and ultimately empowering improvements of ESG metrics within the supply chain alongside facilitating the credible flow of impact data to meet legislative requirements at a product level. For brands, supply chain due diligence and sustainability strategies need material traceability, provided by reliable, digital platforms such as TrusTrace, to build data-informed visibility of supply chain journeys to truly transition to more sustainable practices.”

adidas as Early Adopter of TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance

Global sports brand adidas is one of the first large companies to adopt TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance, after providing early input on its development, focusing on a scalable, digital solution integrating seamlessly with enterprise systems like PLM, Purchase Order System and Supplier Management systems to minimize the need for manual intervention. Being able to track materials in a standardised, digital and scalable way helps adidas to create more transparency on their sustainability goals, including moving to 100% recycled polyester by 2024, and having 9 out of 10 of their articles featuring a sustainable technology, material, design or manufacturing method by 2025.

“As part of its commitment to sustainability, adidas has worked with TrusTrace to gain more visibility into our complete supply chain down to the materials level,” said Katja Schreiber, Senior Vice President Sustainability at adidas. “The information gleaned from TrusTrace Certified Material Compliance will help us to create even more transparency of our sustainability efforts.”